Viruses are data which is compiled or inserted in an application program for destroying terminal functions, and will affect the normal use of the application program, are able to self-replicate, and generally take the form of as a set of instructions or program codes. Viruses have the characteristics of destruction, replication and infection. A terminal may use an antivirus engine to carry out virus scanning processing on a file, so as to immediately discover a virus file. The so-called virus file refers to a file containing a virus. If the antivirus engine discovers a virus file, a corresponding alarm prompt may pop up to remind a user to delete the virus file. After receiving a deletion instruction triggered by the user, the antivirus engine may delete the virus file.
However, due to the replication of the virus, a great number of virus files may be replicated, and a lot of system resources of a terminal may be occupied by using the method in the prior art to carry out virus scanning processing on each file and then pop up a corresponding alarm prompt regarding a confirmed virus file to remind a user to delete the virus file, thus resulting in a reduction in the processing performance of the terminal.